


Heartspeak

by takethembystorm



Series: Tea Break [42]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, i kid, it's all just pain, pain and suffering, they will never be happy again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-22
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-08-16 16:02:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8108665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/takethembystorm/pseuds/takethembystorm
Summary: Marinette won't admit that she's in love, with associated consequences.





	1. Misspeak

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://marichat-ladybee.tumblr.com/post/148315479142/mari-you-look-nice-i-want-to-kiss-you-chat).

She shouldn’t have flirted back at him. Or at the very least she should have done something to discourage him, given him a cooler reception than she had, ignored his ridiculous puns and jokes more than she had, been---when you got down to it---less affectionate with him than she had. Something.

But ~~her~~ the silly cat had dropped that damnable package off---a little something for the trouble, he’d written, a little something as compensation for the inconvenience of her needing to get him out of trouble instead of the other way around---and she’d had to open it ~~just out of courtesy because it’d be rude to throw away a present~~ and she’d had to find the bolt of finest silk inside, enough for a dress and a half, two if she wanted to shorten the hem and skimp a little on the material elsewhere, and she’d had to arrange for another meeting just to thank him and then she’d had to set up a third meeting when she’d noticed how reluctant he was to leave that time and then they’d just clicked somehow, like she and Alya or Adrien and Nino had clicked.  


There was a long chain of "justs” and “hads” leading them here. To this time, and to this place.

“Hey, Princess?” Chat says, waving a hand a few times in front of her eyes. She blinks and swats at it on reflex as his words---tinged with shades of warm amusement and edged with mild concern---burrow down and nestle someplace next to her heart, a sudden boiling weight, a sudden tightness in her breathing, a sudden pressure in her chest. Chat holds both his hands up in mock surrender and leans away from her.

“Hey, hey,” he says with a slight smile---and her breathing is just incrementally tighter as she answers it with a slight scowl---as she flails weakly once more at him for the look of the thing. “You wouldn’t want to cripple me here, Princess, Ladybug might need my help and I can’t do that if I’m laid up in hospital with my arm shattered by one of your mighty blows.”

“Wuss,” she says, and Chat breaks into a quiet chuckle, her bones resonating with the sound. It’s not fair that he can do this to her. Not when he’s just a friend, just someone like Nino or Alya.  


“Okay,” he says after a quiet minute. “Seriously, what’s up? I know I’m pretty, but I think something’s wrong when you’ve been staring at me for more than thirty seconds straight.”

Marinette catches herself and forces her gaze back down into her lap. She’s wearing, yes, her usual pink pajama pants, loose and comfy and warm, the cotton weave wearing a little thinly at the side of her knee, where she’d taken to rubbing at it with her thumb on nights like these, when the dark thoughts came to her  


She quashes the upwelling tide and forces her thumb to still its motion.  


“Come on,” Chat says, his voice low and smooth. He nudges her gently in the side with an elbow and she hammers down the instinctive urge, the by-now old habit to nudge back, to turn to him laughing or frowning with such overacted intensity that he’d immediately burst out laughing with his wheezing little cackle of a laugh or smile toothily back.

“Come on,” he repeats, a little quieter, a little more gently. “It’s me, Marinette.”

Which is the entire issue, of course. Him. Him with his cheesy jokes and his pyrite cheer, his fierce kindness wielded like an axe against the evils of the world, his utter refusal to be anything other than a decent person. The him that gave kids piggyback rides and capered for their amusement and came back after a hard battle to comfort Papillon’s victims. Him, looking at her under the wan light of this half-moon above.  


The him that was so hard not to fall for, in spite of all the flirting. ~~In spite of Adrien.~~  


“All right,” Chat says after a minute. He scoots away a little and reclines languidly on his elbows, watching the twinkling stars above with a small contented smile as Marinette watches him from the corner of his eye.   


It couldn’t hurt. Just. Just ~~to admit it~~ to herself, at least. Just to say that her affections were more than merely friendly.  


“You look nice,” she says, her tongue mangling the words in her head on instructions from the sentiments in her heart. “I want to kiss you.”

Chat blinks, then turns towards her, his ears perking up. “I’m sorry, what?”

Shit. _Shit._ The enhanced hearing, how could she have forgotten about his enhanced hearing, oh _shit._  


Deny, that was the thing.

Deny everything, it was just a quote, or something misheard, deny it deny it _deny it._

“I said if you died I wouldn’t miss you!”  


She feels the words slip oil-slick from her tongue, propelled by ill-considered panic with all the unstoppable inevitability of a lit match spiraling downwards under gravity's clutching fingers, sees his eyes go wide with shock, the little exhale as though she’d just driven a knife into his chest, the reflexive recoiling from her shout.

She sits there. He sits there. Neither say anything in their shock.  


Then Chat rises, his every movement measured and slow and overly careful, the movements of a man walking alongside a precipice, the waves crashing at the rocks below. His hand trembles once before he clenches it into a tight fist.

“I,” he says, “wasn’t aware. Of the strength of your feelings. On. On this matter.” A tight breath that Marinette struggles to replicate, breath enough to apologize, to admit the error, to drag him back even as the avalanche thunders down towards the both of them.

Just one breath, just enough breath to say one word, to say “stop”, to stop this to preserve this to save this.

“I won’t bother you further Prin---Marinette,” he says, correcting himself. Then he coils and leaps away.

~~No.~~

The skylight behind Marinette creaks open after some time.  


“Marinette?” Sabine says tiredly. “Why are you up here this late? Was it you that shouted?”

“Couldn’t sleep, Mama,” Marinette says, staring blankly out at the night.

“All right. Just be sure to get to sleep,” Sabine says after a moment. The skylight creaks back down and shuts with a dull _clunk_ of metal against metal.

Marinette sits as the dew settles into her clothes and the chill seeps into her chest, and the half-moon’s wan light descends towards the dawn.  



	2. Missense

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marinette tries to deal with the fallout from her outburst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inspired in part by a conversation I had with [megatraven](http://megatraven.tumblr.com/) and by [this](http://kwamikwami.tumblr.com/post/149706527414/blame-miracufic-making-me-think-of-all-the-times) piece of art by [kwamikwami](http://kwamikwami.tumblr.com/).

Marinette finds herself reaching upwards towards her skylight as she climbs into bed. She stares for a moment, first at her hand, then at her skylight.

Then, with a sigh, she forces herself to lie down, pulling her comforter over herself as a ward against the chill infiltrating her room. She wriggles around a little bit, finding a comfortable position.  


She lies there for a little while.

The moon is up. A full moon, seeming abnormally large tonight through the skylight glass, its radiance bright and cool and almost sterile in the cloudless night sky, drowning out every other twinkling star, leaving it stark and proud in the sky, seemingly the sole celestial body in the heavens. A high-flying plane blinks across it, its presence betrayed by the flash of its running lights and the quiet rumble of its engines. She’d stayed up often, looking at moons like these.  


She rolls over and presses her face into her pillow, dragging the heavy comforter up and over her head; the world becomes a small, soap-scented hutch of rustling warmth. A trickle of cold slips in from the breathing hole she’d left near her head, but she curls her knees to her chest and ignores it.

In the quiet of her room, something seethes and rumbles with phantom thunder and finally, begins to drizzle down.  


Two weeks, almost.

Two weeks since everything had started unraveling. Two weeks since she’d woken and gone to school to find Adrien ignoring her. Two weeks of terse answers and tensed shoulders, of him refusing even to look at her beyond the occasional glance or the swift passage of his gaze across her en route to someone else. Two weeks since she, her nerves frayed and mind twanging with guilt, had snapped at Nino and Alya, and driven them off to a wary distance as well.  


The thought strikes with all the unstoppable rapidity of a lightning bolt, leaving her blinking at the afterimage, her ears ringing with the thunderclap.  


And two weeks since Marinette had seen Chat Noir.

She bats the thought away, hits it in the head with a shovel, and makes an attempt to bury its body.

No.

No, she couldn’t think of him like that, not now, not without the armor of the mask and suit in the way. That was what had gotten her into this mess in the first place.

Before she can properly set the thought in the front of her mind, a nastily familiar voice pipes up.  


No, that was your own stupid mouth and your own stupid panic and your own stupid, _stupid_ refusal to accept that on some level you like him. ~~_Like_~~ like him. ~~You like him like you like Adrien~~ , you like his smile and his ridiculous little laugh, you like his passion and his dumb jokes, you like the way he goes all googly-eyed when he talks about Ladybug—well, you, in point of fact—and the almost puppy-dog way in which he tries to impress her, you. Like. Him.

And you don’t like that you’re thinking of him as anything aside from your coworker.

For good reason, she tries to argue. Tikki had insisted—Tikki had near pleaded, near demanded—that no one know she was Ladybug. Including Chat. And he was getting close, too close with his visits to her, and she didn’t like him like that anyways, and he was in love with Ladybug, not her. There are a million reasons why it wouldn’t work out, why it was a bad idea. Even if he was still reeling from _it_ , even in front of Ladybug, from whom he hides so much else ~~that he’d nevertheless revealed to Marinette~~.  


And none of that matters, does it, taunts the spiteful little sneering voice in her head like razor wire sawing into her brain, because there’s still a hole in you the exact size and shape of his smile.

It’s how the conversation has ended every night for a week, because there’s no response to that. None that wouldn’t be a lie too big to believe.

Marinette curls up a little tighter into herself, wrapping her arms around her legs.

Then, her thoughts sleeting past in the howling tempest of her mind, she lets herself be sandblasted slowly into unconsciousness.

* * *

The sun will come up tomorrow, as the song goes.

No one ever said that it had to come up on a better world.

Marinette wakes up with her arms and legs still unbearably heavy with weary unremembered dreams, her thoughts trickling down like a coin falling through honey.

Right. Sunlight, tweeting, annoyingly cheery birds outside. Morning.

Food.

Teeth.

Change.

School.  


~~Adrien.~~ And her friends.  


She pushes herself up, murmuring a sleepy apology to Tikki as the kwami slides off of their resting spot on her stomach and plops onto the bed. As an afterthought Marinette pulls the blanket up, tucking it neatly over the kwami before she lists down the staircase.

A splash of cold water helps revive her enough to properly reorganize her priorities. Teeth first. Nice bright shiny teeth.

~~Something needs to go right today, and she can’t fuck up brushing her teeth, can she.~~

Tikki is fully awake by the time Marinette has finished brushing, just as she tries to shuck out of her pajama pants, catches her foot in a leg, and nearly cracks her head on the windowsill.

“Mari---” the spirit says, zipping down to help steady Marinette as she hops around, trying to regain her balance. Marinette waves them off and sits on the edge of her desk and manages to get the rest of her sleep clothes off without giving herself a concussion. Right. One point Marinette. Suck it, world.  


Breakfast goes without incident. She doesn’t disembowel herself with the butter knife, though Tom and Sabine glance at her more than once with concern on their faces, both of them clearly wanting to say something and just as clearly not wanting to be the first to broach the subject. Marinette, with good grace, doesn’t bring it up.

And then it’s school.  


Alya is waiting for her at the front doors as Marinette trots up, greeting her with a brief wave before she turns and walks inside.

“Hey,” Marinette says to Alya.  


Alya’s next step lands a few centimeters further to the right from Marinette than her last.

“Hey,” Alya replies after a few seconds. She doesn’t move closer, doesn’t look at Marinette. “You feeling better? I guess?”

“I’m fine,” Marinette says. The phrase carries more thorns than she’d intended, judging from the nervous stutter-sidestep Alya takes, like the reaction of a spooked horse, hearing the storm rumbling on the horizon. Damn it. Two weeks, two _freaking_ weeks. She should have this under control  


“I’m fine,” Marinette repeats, a little more force behind her words. “You?”

“Fine,” Alya says after a second’s hesitation.

For another few seconds the only sound between them is the muted thud of their shoes against the stairs as they head up to the second floor.

“Uh, Marinette?” Alya says.

“Yeah?”

“You’ve been saying that you’re fine for the past couple weeks,” Alya says carefully.

“I am.”

“Okay, okay. You are, you’re fine,” Alya says. “But, like. You know that whatever’s bothering you, you can talk to me, right?”

Marinette sees Alya’s hand twitch out in her direction before she arrests the motion. After a moment Alya tucks her thumb underneath the strap of her messenger bag and quickens her pace, taking the stairs two at a time to the second floor before marching steadily to class.

The classroom goes silent as Marinette trails in after Alya. A dozen---no, eleven, ~~Adrien keeps his eyes fixed midway between the chalkboard and the floorboards at his feet~~ \---gazes fall on her with guillotine weight before they quickly look away. Alya quickly takes her seat as Marinette stands in the doorway, her ribs tightening about her heart.

Breathe, Marinette.

A space forms around her as she walks to her seat, a gaping vacuum as every single person, Alya and Nino ~~and Adrien~~ and all of her other classmates involuntarily lean very slightly away from her, trying not to catch her attention. Someone starts to make very quiet _tickticktick_ noises with their tongue as she starts up the rows of desks. Probably Chloe; she’d been the one to make that whole “don’t set off the Ticking Timebomb” remark on Monday. Or had that been last Friday? Everything was starting to blur together in the absence of actually restful sleep.  


That wasn’t the point. That doesn’t matter, she’s all right and everything will be all right in time. Focus. Ignore--- _that_. It was worse before this year, when she didn’t have Alya, or Nino, or Tikki or Adrien ~~or Chat~~ , and she survived that.

She can survive this.

Class passes in a semi-coherent blur, as does the next lecture from Mme. Mendeleiev about something physics-y or something. More time passes in a fatigued blur.

“Hey,” someone by her right elbow says.

She blinks herself free from her stupor and says, “Yes?”

Alya stands a little way off from her, thumbs tucked behind the strap of her bag. Alya flinches back a little as Marinette’s gaze focuses on her. It’s a small motion, a slight animal tightening of the legs and shoulders, a movement of the arms upwards into a defensive shield, but it’s there, and Marinette’s jacket seems to shrink around her by two or three sizes in the span of a breath.  


“H-Hey,” Alya says. “Class ended a minute ago, you coming?”

“What?”

Again the flinch. Marinette forces herself to breathe a little more freely and deeply.

“Sorry, just had a few things on my mind,” Marinette says. “Chloe.”

“Oh,” Alya says. “Well, it’s lunch now.”

Marinette’s stomach growls in response to the word, and Alya smiles a little as Marinette collects her things and grabs her bag.  


“Come on, it’s not like she can follow us to your place,” Alya says.  


Chloe can’t. Chloe doesn’t, at least in the literal sense.

In the metaphorical sense, a freaking supervillain—an akuma-possessed and thoroughly pissed plumber—decides to blow up the hotel about five seconds after she and Alya take a step inside the bakery, and she and Nino are forced to run off after Alya.

* * *

Ladybug watches.

Chat stands stock-still as a wall of water, ten meters tall and twice that across rushes towards him, his gaze steady and calm.

Get out of the way, a voice begins to shrill in her head. Jump out of the way, go, move, _jump_.

He does none of that. Instead, as she watches, he slumps out of his defensive stance, his arms falling to his sides. His eyes close in mute acceptance.

She breaks into a dead sprint and hits Chat at the waist in a tackle hard enough that the impact breaks through their usual invulnerability in a dull pulse of discomfort, their path nearly horizontal to the street as the wave rushes past and slams into a building, reducing it and the four rows of buildings behind it to a splintered mass of timber and pulverized brick and concrete. A wavelet clips her foot, sending the two of them spinning so that they hit the road in an uncontrolled tumble.  


Screams, howls of sheer agony and terror and cries for help ring out behind them as she picks herself up, dragging Chat up by an arm.  


She needs to save them. She needs to stop the water-wielding maniac before he levels Paris altogether.

But something in her twangs as she looks at Chat’s dull, lifeless expression, and she lassoes a convenient chimney with her yoyo and hauls the two of them away, leaping quickly from rooftop to rooftop.

As soon as they’re out of sight she lets herself snap.

“What the fuck?” she says, her voice trembling, “What the fuck do you think you were doing there?”

Chat blinks at her, then looks down. His staff lies loosely in his hands, and he rolls it back and forth for a second before letting it drop. It rolls down the roof and clatters into a gutter.

“Answer me!” Ladybug says.

Chat glances up at her. “You don’t need my help,” he says quietly. “You’ve handled worse before without me. Sometimes fighting me too.”

“That’s not,” Ladybug says, “a fucking answer.”

He shrugs, very slightly. “It’s enough of---”

“No it fucking isn’t,” she says in a bladed hiss, and Chat flinches away from her. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

“It’s nothing you need concern yourself---”

“Like fuck it isn’t,” she says. “What the fuck were you thinking, I want a fucking answer, now.”

The edges of Chat’s mouth set, his brows knitting together, and for a second Ladybug thinks that he’s going to argue. Then he slumps again.

“I’ve been misusing the Miraculous,” he says. “Been seeing someone as Chat. And, well.” He breathes in once, deeply, then sighs. “She made it very clear that she wouldn’t miss me if I died.”

Her words, thrown back at her like a knife in the guts.

Chat continues, his gaze cast out at the horizon, his voice steady even as tears begin to well at the corners of his eyes. “And if someone that good, that kind, that caring thinks that little of me---”

He breaks off and swipes briefly at his eyes.

“If someone like her thinks that I don’t deserve that consideration,” he says, a little quieter. “I probably don’t.”

He sighs again and waves in the general direction of the havoc they’d left behind. “Go,” he says. “You can handle it. I’ll. Go do something, I guess. Not be a disappointment, hopefully.”  


“Why were you visiting her?” she asks, surprised at how steady her voice is.

Chat shrugs. “We got off to a bad start when we first met,” he says. “And I figured that maybe I could get a second chance as Chat Noir. Second chance to make a good impression on her. Be her friend.”

A smile flits butterfly-swift across his face, twisted and bitter as hemlock. “Obviously that worked out well.”

She just stares at him as screams, muted with distance, echo off of buildings. Another block is leveled by a wave, crumbling to the ground accompanied by the sounds of shrieking metal and shattering glass.

“I think,” she says after a minute, “that you mean more to her than you might realize.”

“Oh, come on,” he begins, but she holds up a hand and Chat stops.

“I think I know who you’re talking about,” she says. “The girl you’ve been visiting.”

“Oh?”  


“She’s maybe not as great as you think she is,” she presses on. “She’s a little selfish. A little scared. A lot scared, of a lot of things.”

“Like me,” Chat says. “I mean, come on, guy comes by in the dead of night to visit her, what kinda creep does---”

“Not of you---”

“How do you know?” he says, his voice suddenly sharp. He looks up and his gaze slices into her, needle-sharp. “How do you know, Ladybug? I was there, and she made her feelings on the matter explicit, ‘if you died I wouldn’t miss you’.”

The words melt like acid into her chest as he spits them out.

“I know her,” she says, cutting off his rant before he can build up momentum. “And I’ve been talking to her. And she misses you, and all she wants, _all_ she wants is to apologize. To clear the air.”

She stands there, trembling, fists clenched as Chat stares at her. His eyes dart across her face looking for the lie that he knows must be there somewhere, studying her posture, her stance, the pattern of her breaths for the hint that will reveal the twisting serpent of insincerity.  


He lets his gaze drop back down to his hands after a minute.

“I’m not going to violate her privacy,” he says.

“I don’t think she’d mind if you visited again,” she says, her voice gaining an edge of desperation.

“I won’t,” he repeats. “She deserves a better class of visitor than me anyways.”  


“But she wants _you_ ,” she says. “She wants _you_ to visit her---just, for fuck’s sake, Chat just once. Just once, just go and let her say her piece---no, shut the fuck up, Chat, I’m not fucking interested in hearing you put yourself down again shut up---just go and talk to her. Please.”

“If not for her than for me,” she adds, after a second’s desperate thought.

Chat refuses to look at her as he stands, dusting himself off, and retrieves his staff. He looks down at it for a second. His fingers tighten around it before he extends it to its customary two-meter combat length. He looks up, focusing on the swathe of destruction still being hammered across Paris.  


“Let’s just take care of this guy first,” he says. “We have a job to do.”

* * *

Chat had foregone the customary fistbump after their victory, and neither of them had had the time for an extended chase anyways.  


Marinette sits crosslegged on her bed, staring at her skylight. Her neck had gone stiff half an hour ago, but she needs to be here, needs to be awake for ~~if~~ when he comes.

23:03, her bedside clock displays. Then 23:15.

Still no Chat. She briefly considers climbing up onto the terrace.

23:22. Marinette gathers up her comforter and tosses it onto the terrace, following it up a moment later. She wraps it around herself and checks the time on her phone.

23:23.

23:31, and her eyes are growing heavy. She blinks rapidly, trying to maintain consciousness.

23:45, and---

“Marinette,” someone says, gently shaking her by the shoulders.

Marinette wakes with a jolt, tangling her arms and legs in the comforter.

Chat crouches before her. The moment her eyes focus on him he backs up a couple steps.

“You’ll catch your death of cold out here,” Chat says. “Uh. Sorry to come back, after you---”

“No, no,” she says, “it’s all right. I’ve---I’ve been meaning to talk to you. I’ve wanted to talk to you.”

Notre Dame strikes midnight, and the two of them pause, letting the bells’ sonorous tones die away before either of them speak again.

“So I’ve heard,” Chat says. “Look, I’ll not be here long. Just---what did you have to say?”

Well, here went nothing.

“Well,” she says, taking a steadying breath. “Firstly, that I think I’d like to kiss you.”

He blinks at her.

* * *

No kissing happens. A lot of talk does, though. A lot of apologizing, mostly on her part, though not for lack of trying on Chat’s part.

The both of them go to bed late, and sleep hard.

And the sun does come up tomorrow.

It comes up on a slightly better world.  



	3. Misaimed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marinette comes to a resolution.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to [loosescrewslefty](http://loosescrewslefty.tumblr.com/), [megatraven](http://megatraven.tumblr.com/), and [gigiree](http://gigiree.tumblr.com/) for helping this to not be total crap.

_Whang_.

Marinette finds herself on her ass, on the ground, staring at the lamppost she'd just walked right into, with her face in an utterly gratuitous amount of pain for such a minor insult.  She gingerly reaches up and probes the bridge of her nose with her fingertips.

Well, it didn’t _seem_ to be broken, she thinks muzzily.  Hadn’t heard anything breaking, although ~~_fuck her_~~ it hurt like blazes.

Through the haze of pain-spurred tears she vaguely makes out Alya, collapsing to the ground in a little wound-up ball of hysterics, and the stream of students walking to school, their expressions a mix of curiosity and wariness.

“It is not that funny,” Marinette complains.  She tweaks her nose gently, testing the limits of _ow_.  That far, apparently.  “Alya, stop it, it’s not that funny.  I said stop.”

Alya, heedless of her friend, continues cackling with her arms folded across her stomach, her face rapidly reddening with oxygen deprivation.

“Alyaaaaa.”

“I’m sorry,” Alya manages to wheeze out after a couple tries.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.  Just—“she struggles to take in a breath”—give me a minute please.”

Marinette gives her best friend, her _best_ friend, she reminds herself, a minute and takes the time to get to her feet and brush herself off, trying to rearrange her aching features into something like her mother’s patent Maternal Stare of Disapproval, which could punch through sheet steel at ten meters.

Alya plants her hands on her knees, gulps down a few final lungfuls of air, and finally manages to shove herself back upright.

“Right,” she says. “Right, I think I’m better now.  I think I’m better now.”

She glances up at the expression on Marinette’s face and her smile flickers wider.

“I do regret sometimes not having a GoPro on me at all times,” she muses.

“Alya.”

“Oh come on, we could’ve put it on Youtube,” Alya says.  “Bet you we would’ve got a million views before the end of the week.”

“Alya!”

“Or we could’ve sent it to Adrien,” Alya continues cheerily.  “I bet you he would’ve gotten a kick out of it.”

“You are not nearly as funny as you think you are, Alya,” Marinette says, planting a fist on her hip.

“I’m a one-woman comedy troupe,” Alya says.  “Anyways that won’t be necessary, he saw everything.”

“Ha ha,” Marinette says after a moment of utter, chasm-dangling terror, her voice utterly flat. “Ho ho.  My sides.  They ache.”

Alya merely shrugs, her grin growing toothier.  “Suit yourself.”

Someone lays a hand on Marinette’s shoulder.  She tries to keep from elbowing him in the throat on reflex as she turns and mostly succeeds.

“Marinette, holy crap, are you all right?” Adrien says.

~~_ohcrapohcrapohcrap_ ~~

“Yes!” she says quickly, ~~god he was close~~.  “I mean yes, thank you for asking.”

“You’re not bleeding or anything?” he says.  “We keep a first aid kit in the car, let me just call the Gorilla over—“

He leans in a little further, his worried gaze flicking over her face, and she can feel the redness flooding upwards and outwards, no longer just the red of injury but now the red of a blush, burning with equal parts embarrassment and guilty pleasure at having him fuss over her.   ~~Just lean in a little closer, Marinette, just a little closer.~~

Marinette slowly reaches up, places her fingertips lightly on his chest, and applies the slightest pressure.  Adrien leans back hurriedly.

“I am fine,” she repeats, smiling at him.  “Thank you for asking.”

Adrien stares at her for a couple seconds more, his brow furrowed in concern.

Finally he shrugs. “All right, if you say so—“

“You know,” Alya says with altogether too much innocence, “she might have a concussion or something, you really should take her to the school nurse and have that checked out oh hey there’s Nino byeeeeeeee~”

Marinette gapes at Alya as she scurries off, grabs Nino by an arm, and drags him through the school’s main gates.

“Uh,” Adrien says. “What?”

“Alya is doing,” Marinette says, gesturing with a hand, “something.”

“Apparently,” Adrien says.  “You’re, uh, absolutely sure that you’re—“

“I’m fine,” Marinette says, laughing, “sheesh, stop being such a mother hen, I’ve had worse, Adrien.”

“Look, I’m just saying that looked nasty,” Adrien says.

“The key word,” Marinette says, walking towards the school’s front gates, “being looked. Really, I’m all right.”

“I’ve been hit in the face before,” he says.  He follows a step behind her.  “even if it looks fine it might not be fine, and that did not look—”

“Adrien, really, I appreciate the concern,” she says, “but I’m not even bleeding, stop worrying.”

Adrien concedes the point with a shrug.  “Can I at least walk you to class then?”

“We’re in the same class, Adrien,” Marinette says.

“Nevertheless.”

Marinette rolls her eyes at him.  “Oh, all right,” she says.  “Let’s go then.”

* * *

“I’m so proud of you,” Alya coos as they leave for the day.

“What for?” Marinette says.

“You actually managed to hold an entire conversation with Adrien without freaking completely out,” Alya says.

“Oh, come on, Alya, I haven’t flipped out around him for ages—“

“If by ages you mean less than a month,” Alya says.  She pretends to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye.

“Oh, _stop that_ ,” Marinette groans.

“My little girl is growing up so fast,” Alya says, and gets a nudge in the ribs from Marinette’s elbow.  “Seriously, though, you two looked a lot, well.  Better today, something happen?”

“Way to be concise and evocative,” Marinette says.  “Say, aren’t you supposed to be a reporter?”

“I run a blog,” Alya says.

“Same thing,” Marinette says.  “Nowadays.”

Alya considers this for a moment, then bobbles her head back and forth in acquiescence. “Fine,” she says.  “I mean, you two looked, uh.  A lot more comfortable around each other?  A lot more relaxed, that sort of thing.  Did something happen?”

She studies Marinette’s suddenly tense profile.

* * *

“I’m sorry, Marinette,” he says as they sit across from each other, his eyes fixed on his hands folded in his lap.

She knows there and then exactly what words will follow, piling up behind his walled-up fear like so much snow above the treeline.

“I can’t accept your feelings.”

“Because of Ladybug?” Marinette says.  “It’s all right, I understand.”

* * *

“Something did happen, huh,” Alya says.

“I had a talk with someone,” Marinette says.  “A necessary one.  It, well, made me rethink a few things about how I felt about him.”

* * *

“No,” he says, “not because of that.  Well, okay, not entirely—“

He drags a hand through his already wind-swept hair and sighs.

“Let me guess,” she says.  She reaches over and places a hand on his knee, briefly.  “You think it wouldn’t be fair to me, because of how you feel about Ladybug.”

“I love Ladybug,” he says, the words burrowing deeply and warmly into Marinette’s chest, curling up around a pit of gut-wrenching dread.  “And I don’t feel the same way about you, and—“another sigh, and another hand run distractingly through his hair”—it wouldn’t be fair to you, as cliché as it sounds.”

“I mean,” he says after a second, “it’s not that I don’t find you attractive, on, uh, multiple levels.  It’s just—“

“You can’t give up on Ladybug,” she says.

“I wouldn’t have put it exactly like that, but yeah,” Chat says.

* * *

“I figured that it wasn’t fair to him,” Marinette says.

Alya stares at her for a second, then snorts.  “Now who’s being ‘concise and evocative’,” Alya says.

“I’m not a reporter,” Marinette says, with a hint of smugness.

Alya rolls her eyes at her.  “Well, so long as you’re okay with it,” she says.  “ _Are_ you okay with it?”

Marinette lets the tension ease out of her neck and shoulders.

“I’d like to think I am,” she says.  “I’ve committed to it, after all.”

* * *

“I think that Ladybug appreciates your commitment,” she says.

“I’d like to think that too,” he says.

* * *

The night air is cool on her face as she sits next to Chat at their usual spot atop the Eiffel Tower, brushing a stray bang back behind her ear.

“Evening, my Lady,” Chat murmurs.

“Evening, Kitty,” she replies.

“So I hear you’ve been seducing innocent girls off of the street,” she says without preamble, and watches with a little twinge of guilty pleasure as he whirls to face her, horror written all over his features.

“I swear, Ladybug,” he says, “nothing like that has been going on—oh, you talked to Marinette.” He watches her smile curl up like paper in a flame, and hears her silent, choked-off laughter.

“Are you,” he says, “are you having fun at my expense?”

“Absolutely,” she says.

“How cruel my Lady is,” he says, hand to heart, pout in full force.

“Only when I find it amusing,” she says.  “So, how are you feeling?”

“We can’t leave the soul-searching questions until—“ he begins, hopefully.

“Come on, Chat,” she says, “it’s me.”

“Oh hey, I think I see someone being mugged down there we should go and check that—“

“ _Chat_.”

He looks at her and wilts a little.

“All right,” he says, “yeah, we talked, and yeah, I feel better about the whole situation.” His hand runs through his hair, a familiar, nervous gesture, followed by a rueful chuckle.  “I don’t think she does, though.  Never thought I’d be in a position to break someone’s heart.”

“I think she appreciates your honesty more than that,” she says.

“Maybe,” he says, shrugging.  “Doesn’t change the fact that I still hurt her, and I’m going to need to live up to that.”

They lapse into silence, staring at Paris, at its moving rivers of lights slowed to a trickle by the lateness of the hour, surrounded in that moment by the quiet stillness between a breath and a blink, the moment between the coiling of muscles and the leap.

“Hey, Chat?” she says.

“Mm?” he says, turning to face her.

And now she was on the edge of the abyss, and staring into the black.

Might as well take the plunge.

“You look nice,” she says, her tongue speaking the treacherous words on instructions from the sentiments in her heart.  “I want to kiss you.”

And then, as he looks on in shock, she reaches up and removes her earrings.  The Tower, its lights turned off for the night, flares briefly and pinkly.

“Oh,” he says as Marinette shivers in the chill night air.

“S-s-surprised?” she says, wrapping her arms around herself.  ~~Holy crap the suits really did take the edge off of the weather.~~   Chat, moving on reflex, scooches closer and lends her the fever warmth of his body.  “Th-thanks.”

“Marinette,” Tikki says, tiny voice laden with disapproval.

“S-Sorry, Tikki,” Marinette says.

“I told you that revealing yourself was an unnecessary risk,” Tikki says.

“Yes, Tikki.”

“So why did you do it?”

Marinette sighs and elbows Chat gently in the ribs.  “It wasn’t fair to him,” she says.  “For, y’know, me to want him like that when he was in love with someone else—well, me—to use Ladybug to get what I wanted from him.”

“So you do want me,” Chat says with a cautious air.  Marinette rolls her eyes.

“Yes, kitty,” she says patiently.  “I don’t know when, and I don’t know why, but at some point you actually did become more attractive to me than Adrien Agreste.”

“What?” she says a second later.  “I never told you about him?”

“Uh, no,” Chat says.  “You had a crush on him?”

“I ~~am~~ was in love with him,” Marinette says.  “He’s good and kind, and thoughtful and sweet—”

“And sexy?”

“And he’s hot,” Marinette concedes.  “But you are all those things too, and at some point I decided that you were more deserving.”

“So you,” Chat says, “are in love with Adrien Agreste.”

“Were,” Marinette says.  “And yes.”

“And you are in love with me,” he continues.

“Yes,” she says.  “I decided that being in love with Adrien—”  She swallows, looks up at Chat, and drops her gaze again.  “—wasn’t as important as just being honest to my choices.  Unconscious or not.”

She blinks in the sudden glare of his toothy smile.  Tikki looks at Chat, then smacks themselves in the face and groans.

“What?” she says.

“Boy, do I have a surprise for you,” he says.


End file.
